The Hygiene Hypothesis

The "Hygiene Hypothesis" is a theory that suggests a young child's
environment can be "too clean" to effectively stimulate or challenge the child's
immune system to respond to various threats during the time a child's immune
system is maturing. As a fetus, the immune system is thought to be repressed to
avoid rejecting maternal tissue, but at birth, it must start to recognize
antigens that may be linked to harmful infections. If the environment is "too
clean," the hypothesis suggests that the immune system will not mature properly,
and may not react appropriately when the child's immune system encounters germs
(viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites) or other environmental triggers
(pollen, animal dander, fungal spores) later in life. The hypothesis suggests
that the lack of immune system challenge results in many people developing
immune-related health problems such as asthma.

Although the term "Hygiene
Hypothesis" was proposed in the late 1980's, many investigators trace its
origins to earlier experiments with animals, mainly mice and rats born and
raised in "germ-free" or sterile environments. When experimentally exposed to
low doses of an infectious agent that would not harm normally raised rodents,
these germ-free adolescent and young adult animals became infected quickly and often died. When examined, the
infected animals showed a slow or blunted immune response in these situations.
If they were raised to adolescence or adulthood as germ-free animals and then
were slowly introduced to bacteria found in their normal gastrointestinal
tracts, the rodent's immune response, when exposed to the same pathogen, was much better and the animals usually
survived the infection.

The key to understanding how the hygiene hypothesis might explain the high
level of asthma in developed nations (and perhaps a number of other diseases
such as Crohn's disease,
ulcerative colitis, or
multiple
sclerosis) is knowledge of how the immune system develops, matures, and
self-regulates. Although the details of the development and function of the
immune system can fill books, a very brief summation is as follows:

Stimulation
of the immune system causes a number of immune cell types to proliferate (for
example, T cells, B cells, macrophages, eosinophils, killer cells), some of
which attack infectious agents directly, other produce substances (for example,
antibodies and cytokines) that cause or potentiate immune attacks.

The hygiene
hypothesis suggests that delays in exposure to normal bacteria in the body as
well as disease-causing agents make a weaker immune response, and that in turn,
produces a weaker ability of the immune system to recognize and respond to
suppress the inflammatory response when it is challenged.

Researchers suggest
that bacterial and parasitic organisms, when exposed to a maturing immune
system, cause the continuing development to proceed normally. Consequently, in a
"too clean environment," infants and young children may not have their immune
systems challenged appropriately, and, according to the hygiene hypothesis, go
on to develop problems such as asthma and other immune-related conditions.